Twilight on the Trail
(Bretherton);
Riders of the Timberline
(Selander);
Outlaws of the Desert
(Bretherton);
Secret of the Wastelands
(Abrahams);
Stick to Your Guns
(Selander);
Doomed Caravan
(Selander);
In Old Colorado
(Bretherton);
Border Vigilantes
(Abrahams);
The Round-Up
(Selander);
Pirates on Horseback
(Selander);
The Parson of Panamint
(McGann);
Wide Open Town
(Selander)

Blackboard Jungle
(Brooks);
The Last Hunt
(Brooks);
Land of the Pharaohs
(Hawks)

1956

Lust for Life
(Minnelli) (co)

1957

Witness for the Prosecution
(Wilder);
This Could Be the Night
(Wise);
Something of Value
(Brooks);
King Creole
(Curtiz)

1958

Rio Bravo
(Hawks);
Run Silent, Run Deep
(Wise)

1959

Operation Petticoat
(Edwards);
Day of the Outlaw
(de Toth)

1960

Pollyanna
(Swift);
Hatari!
(Hawks);
Sunrise at Campobello
(Donehue)

1962

The Spiral Road
(Mulligan);
To Kill a Mockingbird
(Mulligan)

1963

Man's Favorite Sport
? (Hawks);
A Gathering of Eagles
(Delbert Mann)

1964

Dear Heart
(Delbert Mann);
Quick, before It Melts
(Delbert Mann)

1965

The Great Race
(Edwards)

1966

Hawaii
(Hill);
Tobruk
(Hiller)

1969

Darling Lili
(Edwards)

Publications

On HARLAN: articles—

Film Comment
(New York), vol. 8, no. 2, Summer 1972.

Focus on Film
(London) no. 13, 1973.

* * *

"This is pretty high on the hog for me," actor Bruce Cabot
once commented of his accommodations at the Ritz in London while filming
Diamonds Are Forever
. "Location shooting usually means sitting in a tent outside
Tombstone eating a box lunch with Duke Wayne." Likely to have been
in the same tent, eating a similar meal, would be Russell Harlan, whose
credentials in action cinema were as impeccable as those of Cabot and
Wayne.

An ex-stuntman, Harlan began his cinematographic career with B-westerns,
working often with veterans like Lloyd Bacon (on
Silver Queen
) and, on
The Parson of Panamint
and
American Empire
with William McGann, once Douglas Fairbanks's cameraman. Few men
more frequently photographed Vasquez Rocks and the other desert settings
beloved of B-westerns. Harlan, perhaps in reaction, developed a flinty
black-and-white photographic style, shadowless and stark, that Lewis
Milestone found ideal for
A Walk in the Sun
, his calculatedly unemotional picture of an American platoon trying to
survive the last days of the war in Italy.

Two years later, Howard Hawks selected Harlan to shoot the seminal
Red River
, which created a bleak and unromantic picture of the west that had hardly
been seen since the days of Thomas Ince and William S. Hart. Hawks was
never a director of vistas and, in this, Harlan precisely echoed his
vision. The dense, harsh lighting style for
Red River
was carried forward intact into Hawks's claustrophobic science
fiction/horror film
The Thing
and then, almost immediately, into
The Big Sky
, a film that introduced a Hawksian intimacy into the spacious world of
the pioneer fur trappers.

The Big Sky
marked the high point of Harlan's relationship with Hawks. He
later shot
Rio Bravo
, but that film is not especially distinguished photographically. He also
did some additional shooting on the risible Egyptian epic
Land of the Pharaohs
, and was one of the dozen cameramen and scriptwriters who worked on the
African comedy/drama
Hatari!
during the five years Hawks took to finish it. Harlan's best work
at this time was with Richard Brooks.
Blackboard Jungle
exploited some of the hard-edged denseness of his work on
The Thing
, and he imported the same edgy urban blackness into the color of
The Last Hunt
, a western which, like
The Big Sky
, reduced the drama and tragedy of westward expansion (in this case
represented by two rival buffalo hunters) to the dimensions of personal
conflict.

For many, Harlan's masterpiece, however, remains
Ruby Gentry
. King Vidor's feverish vision of the developing postwar South
created a world where pillared mansions coexist with decaying swamps,
raccoon hunting with Cadillacs, high fashion with dungarees. Even crawling
through a mist-shrouded Edgar Allan Poe-like swamp to die in Charlton
Heston's arms, Jennifer Jones demanded the high-style close-ups to
which she'd become accustomed while working for David Selznick. Yet
a film that might have been a dime-store mixture of conflicting styles is
coherent and consistent, a copybook exercise in screen lighting.

—John Baxter

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